Article 43 in LCPJ. LCPJ 7.2_A.43.pdf · Article 43 in LCPJ Philip Roth and his ... Brenda Patimkin, Eli the Fanatic, ... American scene. A sense of Jewish history permeates his characters,

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Article 43 in LCPJ

Philip Roth and his Jewish Problem

Abstract

The article addresses the issue of the Jewish problem in Philip Roth’s fiction, through which, relying on contemporary monographs and critical studies, we seek to prove that the label of a “self-hating Jew” is totally erroneous and out of touch with the reality, and that his compelling fiction provides and ensures his position as one of the greatest living American writers.

Key words: Jewishness, holocaust, Philip Roth, identity, counterlives, goy, diaspora.

Introduction

Of all contemporary American writers, Philip Roth is arguably the most ambitious and hailed as America’s best living novelist. Unlike many aging novelists, whose productive qualities wane over time, Roth has demonstrated a unique ability not only to sustain his literary output but even to surpass the scope and talent inherent in his previous writings. His work has garnered every major American literary honor including the Pulitzer Prize, two National Book Critics Circle Awards, a Pen/Faulkner Award and many more. His portrayal of the common man, not as a Jew but as a universal human being and his assault on the American experience, Philip Roth has always tried to explore the deepest recesses of the American Jews and how they have evolved and adapted to the American experience during the second half of the 20th century. Known for having reinvented himself throughout his career, Philip Roth’s work quintessentially portrays the life of American Jews and stands as an introspection of America itself.

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Writing about Jews

Jew Jew Jew Jew Jew Jew! It is coming out of my ears already, the saga of the suffering Jew! I happen also to be a human being! Alexander Portnoy, from Portnoy Complaint

Why can’t Jews with their Jewish problems be human beings with their human problems? Nathan Zuckerman, from The Counterlife

From the start, and early in his career, Philip Roth was considered a self-hating Jew, a Jew who had a problem with his own Jewishness. In the novella Goodbye Columbus (1959), short stories such as “Defender of Faith” added more fuel to the fire, and outraged the “establishment” Jews who felt that Roth was representing Jews in a very derogatory way (Cooper, 1996: 41-42). The phrase “the Jewish question,” or “the Jewish problem,” originates from the title of a book in 1843, “Die Judenfrage,” by the German historian, Bruno Bauer. Bauer argued that Jews could achieve political emancipation only if they relinquished their religious consciousness. While Roth has insisted he does not speak for American Jews and their way of life in America, he has given America a gallery of memorable Jewish characters: for example Sophie and Alexander Portnoy, Brenda Patimkin, Eli the Fanatic, and Nathan Zuckerman are household names. All of them have achieved a social and sexual emancipation by relinquishing if not wholly, then partly their religious consciousness by becoming “rootless” Jews. Early in his writing career, his story “Defender of the Faith,” which appeared in The New Yorker in April 1959, narrates the actions of a Jewish sergeant who decides not to play favourites with Jewish soldiers, while exposing his conflict of loyalties. Some readers thought the story confirmed anti-Semitic stereotypes, and a number of letters to Roth, to the magazine, and to his publisher attacked him for damaging the image of the Jew. “Your one story makes people ... forget all the great Jews who have lived,” claimed one letter to him (Reading Myself, 1975: 702).

Nonetheless, Philip Roth, considered by many the best living American writer and part of the Jewish triumvirate of Bellow-Malamud-Roth, has gone to great lengths to demonstrate his critics that his first and foremost obligation as a writer is toward his art and not to the community. He is



so much the born satirist, and as Podhoretz himself lauds him, “naturally driven by instinct for seizing on those gestures and traits of personality by which people expose their weaknesses and make themselves ridiculous” (Doings, 1964: 240). Being part of the third generation of Jewish-Americans and the youngest writer of the above-mentioned triumvirate, Roth was less affected by the implications of the Holocaust and less inclined to show solidarity, even in arts, toward his community. David Gooblar, in his fantastic analysis of Philip Roth’s major phases of his career, clearly summarizes Roth’s struggle with his readers at first: “Writing when he did, and writing about Jews, Roth could not merely be a writer who happened to be Jewish” (Major Phases, 2011: 11). The external provocations, pressures exerted on him by the Jewish-American community at that time, in many ways dictated the formation of Roth’s literary sensibility, and his sense of himself as a writer for years to come. Unlike Bellow and Malamud, who were considered the “exemplary Jewish sons”, Roth would tread the path of the “bad boy” of Jewish American literature. Of course, that was only the beginning of a series of accusations that would follow him in the coming years. Answering his critics in an essay, “Writing About Jews,” he supported the right of a novelist to explore transgression, and the very core that is defined in the human nature: “The world of fiction frees us from the circumscriptions that society places upon feeling” (Reading Myself, 1975: 195).

At his 1962 appearance at a symposium at Yeshiva University, he was attacked by the audience, although Ralph Ellison, also on the panel, came to his defence. Addressing the audience, he stated: “I am not a Jewish writer; I am a writer who is a Jew.” With this simple statement, Roth perfectly encapsulates the integrity and complexity of Jewish-American cultural identity that mark his works. He exemplifies a salient cultural pattern of post-World War II American writing and as Timothy Parrish states it, “the more ethnic his work seems, the more American it becomes” (Companion, 2007: 127).

It is impossible to talk about Roth’s Americanness without also addressing his Jewishness, because he mingles Jewish history in the wider contextual American scene. A sense of Jewish history permeates his characters, all imbued with the sharpness of wit and layers of emotional insight and socio-



political concerns. They are not Jews staccato, detached from the American dream; on the contrary they are part of it but it is the struggle to balance the former with their own Jewishness that spawns the conflict and creates a paradoxical theatre. In his theatre, where Roth is the puppet master, Jewishness is a pervasive theme: “Jewishness as a problem, as a burden, as a source of strength, and, always, as a source of laughter” (Safer, 2006: 3). Contrary to what Aharon Appelfeld said, “Roth’s Jews are Jews without Judaism”, it is essentially their Judaism in the American context that creates the paradoxical theatre of sheer playfulness and deadly seriousness, which for Roth are his “closest friends” (Conversation with Philip Roth, 1974: 98).

Throughout his career, Roth has been reinventing himself and each of his works is based on cultural heritage and fictional reconstructions of his ethnic past. Many contemporary African-American, Native-American, Hispanic-American, and Asian-American writers attempt to recreate pre-American pasts in order to define their present American identities. Roth’s work has as its premise the knowledge that his historical situation as an American is known to him through the eyes of being a Jew and the descendant of Jews who came to Weequahic, Newark. Thus stated, Roth’s primary focus is not European Jews, Israeli Jews, or even fresh immigrant American Jews. Rather, as in Goodbye, Columbus, The Plot Against America, he writes about the descendants of those immigrants who have found in America something they never imagined in Europe and as Timothy Parrish says, “the opportunity to define how they perceive or do not perceive themselves to be Jews” (Parrish, 2007: 130).

“Thou shalt not reveal in group secrets to the goyim”(Eleventh Commandment)

The Jews that inhabit Roth’s fiction are quite distant to the Jews that inhabit Europe and contrary to the latter have not experienced the atrocities of the Holocaust. To use a term inspired by Roth, the Holocaust is something like the “counterhistory” of American life. Roth’s Jews are not virtuoso Jews, always hiding their libidos for fear of providing ammunition to the goyim. In his essay “Writing about Jews” he describes how one of his earliest stories, “Defender of the Faith” in the novella Goodbye, Columbus was attacked for confirming an “anti-Semitic stereotype” in its portrayal of Sheldon Grossbart, who tries to persuade his superior, Nathan Marx, to do him favours by pleading their shared racial background. The stories explore how Jews are led to this kind of mutual bond and aid by pleading



to their collective suffering of Holocaust and persecution. Yet the story is little concerned with the military, or with World War II, but concentrates on Jews growing comfortable as they settle into the suburbs of America and assimilate into American society, trying to avoid their duties to protect their people from the murderous impresario, Adolf Hitler. As Roth himself holds:

If people of bad intention or weak judgement have converted certain facts of Jewish life into a stereotype of the Jew, that does not mean that such facts are no longer important in our lives, or that they are taboo for the writer of fiction. Literary investigation may even be a way to redeem the facts, to give them the weight and value that they should have in the world, rather than the disproportiate significance they obviously have for some misguided or vicious people. (Reading Myself, 1975: 158)

As stated above, Roth’s fiction tries to de-familiarize stereotypes, tries to strip them of their “victimization”, and analyzes their vices. This is further enforced even by one of his alter egos, Zuckerman, who maintains the question “Why can’t Jews with their Jewish problems be human beings with their human problems?” (The Counterlife, 1986: 228). The distinguished cultural critic Irving Howe, one of the earliest supporters of Goodbye, Columbus (1959), which was also praised by Saul Bellow, became later his harsh detractor, who with his article “Philip Roth Reconsidered” (1972) retracted all his previous plaudits on Roth, a critique so fierce that would sting Roth for years to come. Published in Commentary Magazine with Norman Podhoretz as editor-in-chief, Howe decried in the article Roth’s best-selling novel up to date, Portnoy’s Complaint (1969): “The cruellest thing anyone can do with Portnoy’s Complaint is to read it twice.”

In Irving Howe’s eyes, Roth was not a celebrated Jewish writer like Saul Bellow whom he looked upon as an achievement of a new American style, as distinct as Hemingway’s or Faulkner’s. Even the once liberal leftist Podhoretz regarded the 1969 publication of Portnoy’s Complaint as a literature of self-loathing because it was deemed to be too derogatory and “bad for the Jews.” Other literary critics of the Commentary (steered by Podhoretz) like John W. Aldridge called Roth’s oeuvre “literary onanism” and Marie Syrkin charged him of delighting in Nazi racial defilement “right out of the Goebbels-Streicher script.” Roth was viciously and repeatedly attacked for years to come in Commentary, which lasted for decades and each time he produced a new book. He would later have his final word



with each one of them in the best way he can – a treat in his fiction.

In comparison to Bellow, it is important to note that Roth’s Jew is not Bellow’s Jew, a Jew who, as Howe maintains “is a mingling of high-flown intellectual bravado with racy-tough street Jewishness, all in a comic rhetoric as it keeps racing away from it” (Howe, World 1976: 594-595). Bellow’s representative Jewish characters, such as Tommy Wilhelm, Moses Herzog, and Arthur Sammler, are struggling souls in search for a higher meaning, souls who take their “Jewishness” for granted. Roth’s Jews, by contrast and as noted by Timothy Parrish: “understand their Jewishness in secular terms and as a reflection of their unabashedly American selves” (Parrish, 2007: 49). Irving Howe generally championed Bellow as a Jewish American link to previous generations of Jewish writers and attacked both Roth and Ellison for betraying what he took to be the traditions and concerns of their respective ethnic groups. For him, Roth had abandoned his “Jewishness” in search of the “universal” assimilated American, a charge that Roth would deny and eventually prove his critics wrong by celebrating the Jewish diaspora in Operation Shylock (1993), the Jewish identity in America in American Pastoral (1997), and The Plot Against America (2004).

In “Writing American Fiction,” Roth had already emphasized how his Jewish characters differed from the tradition that Howe protects. His Jews are not just Jewish-American offsprings of Jewish immigrants – they are wholly American in that they intertwine their troubled past, present, and future with American reality and history. If Bellow’s characters like Herzog or Wilhelm are struggling souls capable of living elsewhere and not just in America, Roth’s oeuvre of characters like Sabath, Portnoy, the Swede etc, cannot be detached from the American soil and the aftermath of its history. Reviled and accused as a self-hating Jew, Roth once retaliated that he was not after becoming a Jewish sage like Bellow, but rather a Lenny Bruce of a Jewish joke, one who Portnoy complains of living in it: ‘‘Doctor, this is my only life and I’m living it in the middle of a Jewish joke!” (Portnoy, 1969: 36).

In his influential 1960 essay “Reading American Fiction” Roth speaks of his desire to create subjects not simply at odds with society, as he says is the case with Bellow’s Eugene Henderson in Henderson the Rain King, but characters who would take responsibility for the “communal predicament.” Being accused of doing nothing about Israel and the Jewish cause, Roth thrived in the wake of such allegation and went on to write many strong



novels that examined his ethnic Jewish American conflict and questions of cultural identity formation from virtually every conceivable angle. In Operation Shylock: A Confession (1993) Roth confesses how deeply the Jew is “lodged” in him that without the Jews he would be “no writer at all” since “Jewishness” is the problem that has ignited his creativity (Operation 1993, 288). In his other essay published in Commentary Magazine, “Writing About Jews” (1963), Roth argues that, “Just as there are Jews who feel that my books do nothing for the Jewish cause, so there are Negroes, I am told, who feel that Mr. Ellison’s work had done little for the Negro cause.” In the same letter Roth was asked “Why don’t you leave us alone? Why don’t you write about the Gentiles?”—“Why must you be so critical?”—“Why do you disapprove of us so?” Seemingly, Roth argues that these people are ashamed of what he sees no reason to be ashamed of and are defensive where there is no cause of defence.

Just as Ellison and Morrison have written about the African American experience, so Roth has singularly written about the Jewish American experience. Often accused of writing negatively about his own people, the people who have suffered the Holocaust and under two thousand years of oppression and prejudices, Roth has maintained that American Jews are his people and the ones he knows best with their habits and vices to write about: “Jew Jew Jew Jew Jew Jew! It is coming out of my ears already, the saga of the suffering Jew! I happen also to be a human being!” (Portnoy, 1969: 76). Nevertheless, Roth never lets the reader forget that the ethnic group history he tells, even if “true” in some historical sense, it is also invented just as his fictional characters Philip Roth, Nathan Zuckerman, or Alexander Portnoy are invented. Throughout his career, Roth has always emphasized the supremacy of literary art over the issue of cultural identity without ever surrendering the claim that literature frees us from the inhibitions that society places upon feeling.

If previously in Roth’s books “Jewishness” has been conceived as a psychological condition, with The Counterlife (1986) “Jewishness” became a historical condition. Furthermore, the connotations of one’s Jewishness must be explored not only in Jewishness per se but also in relation to conflicting ideologies conspicuously prevalent within the imagined structure of the novel. The five sections of the novel are constructed in an inverted unusual pattern where characters invent and reinvent themselves, fragmented situations are destroyed to be created anew, and characters are imbued with multiple conflicting selves. Such a structure is unquestionably



postmodern, and it stands in direct opposition to the traditional models of literary inheritance.

The Counterlife is composed of five chapters: “Basel,” “Judea,” “Aloft,” “Gloucestershire,” and “Christendom.” Throughout the five chapters the central question is repeatedly posed: “What is a Jew and how is he to live?” The novel contradicts itself repeatedly and offers no apparent answer to the question but instead comes with more and more questions. The major conflict of the novel revolves around Nathan and his brother Henry with the latter making aliyah or immigration to Israel. Henry has been reborn as Hanoch after having left behind him his family and America in order to redeem himself and be “an authentic” Jew. As Nathan tells Henry’s wife, Carol, “in Israel he [Henry] can be an authentic Jew and everything about him makes sense. In America, being a Jew made him feel “artificial” (Counterlife, 1986: 154). For Henry, living in the midst of “authentic” Jews in Israel makes him feel like he has a role, a mission to play. Being back to Israel, the womb, the root of his Jewishness, he has discovered that he is not “just a Jew,” or “also a Jew,” but “a Jew as deep as those [Israeli] Jews” (Counterlife 61). To Henry, galut [exile] Jews like his brother “are bereft of any sort of context in which actually to be Jewish” (Counterlife 111). However, Henry’s “rebirth” and newfound love for Israel is countered by Shuki who declares that “Israel is the homeland of Jewish abnormality” (Counterlife 73), and that only he and Nathan “are the only normal Jew” (Counterlife 77).

Roth presumably drew Henry’s actions from Theodor Herzl (spiritual father of the Jewish state) and socialist Zionists who asserted that there was no solution to the Jewish question other than for the great majority of the people to be assembled in its homeland. Having found the root of his identity, he attacks his brother Nathan as a “decadent Jew” leading a self-involved, and therefore “abnormal,” Jewish life in America. Nonetheless, the different stories that make up the book expose one another as fictions and challenge one another’s validity as representations of reality. After being stranded in England with his pregnant wife and feeling an anti-semitic atmosphere there, a Jew among Gentiles, Zuckerman declares, “England made a Jew of me in only eight weeks” (Counterlife 324). In Nathan’s words, he is “a Jew without Jews, without Judaism, without Zionism, without Jewishness, without a temple or an army or even a pistol, Jew clearly without a home, just the object itself, like a glass or an apple” (Counterlife 324). According to Henry, these exiled Jews living in



the Diaspora may be considered self-denying Jews, pastoral Jews of the likes of the Swede in American Pastoral, “bereft of any sort of context in which actually to be Jewish” (Counterlife 111).

The Counterlife is organized around several oppositions that raise the question of authenticity; America versus Israel, Diaspora versus aliyah [immigration to Israel], goy [non-Jew] versus Jew, the self versus the counterlive, the individual versus a collective identity, the pastoral versus the anti-pastoral, etc. Roth offers no solution to the riddle and the enacted dichotomies, but instead stresses the “fictionality” of the book, its metafictional layering when Zuckerman tells Maria: “It’s all impersonation – in the absence of a self, one impersonates selves, and after a while impersonates the self that best gets through… What I have instead is a variety of impersonations I can do, and not only of myself. I am a theater, nothing more than a theater” (Counterlife 320-321).

For Zuckerman, the pastoral, that idyllic dream is nothing more than a lie in itself, a lie which later dooms The Swede Levov of American Pastoral. Having before refused to circumcise a male child if he were to have offspring, in the end Zuckerman has come to accept the rite as part of one’s own identity and cultural inheritance, an act which undoes the pastoral: “The pastoral stops here and it stops with circumcision… Circumcision is everything that the pastoral is not and, to my mind, reinforces what the world is about, which isn’t strifeless unity” (Counterlife 323).

In The Counterlife Roth deconstructs the normal/abnormal, diaspora/homeland dichotomies, only to locate and deny an “irreducibly Jewish self” (Shostak 2004, Countertexts 136). Nathan Zuckerman, in stark contrast to his brother Henry, feels deeply rooted in the American experience and only there can he feel himself as an authentic Jew. Authenticity for Nathan as a Jew lies in the Diaspora and not in Israel. As he himself articulates it:

To be the Jew that I was ... I didn’t need to live in a Jewish nation... My landscape wasn’t the Negev wilderness, or the Galilean hills, or the coastal plain of ancient Philistia; it was industrial, immigrant America — Newark where I’d been raised, Chicago where I’d been educated, and New York where I was living. ...My sacred text wasn’t the Bible but novels translated from Russian, German, and French into the language in which I was beginning to write and publish my own fiction — not the semantic



range of classical Hebrew but the jumpy beat of American English was what excited me. (Counterlife 53)

Thus, Zuckerman’s identity is grounded not in Israel but in America. It is where his Jewishness has been shaped and moulded as an offspring of Jewish Diaspora. As Debra Shostak points out in her article “The Diaspora Jew”: “Israel poses an identity crisis for the Diaspora Jew largely because of its symbolic power as the Jewish home.” Indeed, for Nathan, Israel proves “a Jewish homeland that couldn’t have seemed ... more remote” (Counterlife 58). The self-conscious fictionality of The Counterlife proves to be the perfect means for confronting the questions of what it means to be a Jew, a Jew now with his own independent state in the twenty-first century. For Roth there is no real Jewish “self” or the Malamudian “timeless Jew” but rather a multitude of “Jewish selves,” selves that are as diverse and rich as the Diaspora.

Roth’s next novel Operation Shylock (1993) like The Counterlife carries on his preoccupation with the Jewish theme in Israel and Diaspora. Like Henry’s struggles in the second chapter of The Counterlife, Roth poses the same intriguing questions here: where does the authenticity in a Jew lie? Is a Jew authentic “enough” in the Diaspora or in the conflict-ridden land of Israel? Who is real and who is fraud? Is John Demjanjuk the real Ivan the Terrible of Treblinka, the war criminal of the Nazi pogroms? Clearly, Operation Shylock oozes postmodern devices by blurring the line between facts and autobiography. Nonetheless, the authenticity of the novel still distinguishes it from the normal postmodern conventions.

In Operation Shylock, Roth gives Henry’s identity conflict to a character named Philip Roth who must journey to Israel to claim not just the meaning of his Jewish identity but also rekindle the will to go on writing. In the same breath as The Anatomy Lesson, the character Philip Roth, being under the strong influence of the Halcion drug, feels that he has exhausted his themes as an American writer who happens to write about Jews in America. Clearly, this feeling corresponds with the rise of Israel as a world power and its transformation from a victim of the Holocaust to a dominant force in the theater of the Middle East. As is usual with Roth’s oeuvre, the trope of the double takes central stage in the novel. Like the double Nathan/Henry in the Counterlife, Roth’s antagonist is himself or a double of himself: another character named Philip Roth who has usurped the “true” Roth’s identity. This “other” Roth has turned up in Israel, claiming the fame and



notoriety of the true Roth, and advocating the controversial position that Israel the country should be disbanded as a failed historical experiment, or better say - outlived its purposes. Pipik’s (Roth’s name for his double) philosophy of “diasporism” celebrates “the Jew for whom authenticity as a Jew means living in the Diaspora” (Operation Shylock, 1993: 170-171) - a statement that mirrors Roth’s own preoccupation with Jews in America. As stated earlier in the course of this essay, Roth is not interested in the Jews of Israel or those of Europe or even the Jewish immigrants in America. In other words, his subject revolves around the Jews who are offsprings of those immigrants and how they have come to terms in America and its exceptionalism - without losing their authenticity as a Jew in the process.

Therefore, for Roth, the Diaspora Jew is the one who lives “freely in contact with all of mankind” (Operation Shylock 125), accepting his and her place in a multicultural, diversed society, and contributing to it. He continually lampoons and urges to slough off “the incredible drama of being a Jew” (Operation Shylock 329). Operation Shylock can be read as Roth’s ultimate celebration of the Diaspora Jew, especially the American Jews, Jews who are not as many Israelis have charged, “self-questioning, self-hating, alienated, [and] frightened” Jews (Operation Shylock 125), but rather vital, ironic, sympathetic, and tolerant, “people with the Jewish sense of survival that was all human, elastic, adaptable, humorous, [and] creative” (Operation Shylock 126). Having used the trope of the double in both Operation Shylock and The Counterlife, Roth underlies the continual return to the fear and anxiety that troubles many American Jews: they could have been their doppelgängers who never left Europe in the wake of the Nazi pogroms.

In both the above novels, the Jewish identity is overwrought with self-pity and doubts, troubled anxiety of the victim and perpetrator, selves and counterselves. George Ziad, a friend of Nathan in Operation Shylock aptly corroborates this when he states:

What justifies seizing every opportunity to extend Israel’s boundaries? - Auschwitz. The end of the Holocaust is written on that wall in Palestinian blood. Philip! Old friend! All your life you have devoted to saving the Jews from themselves, exposing to them their self-delusions … You have been attacked for this, you have been reviled for this, the conspiracy against you in the Jewish press began at the beginning and has barely let up to this day, a smear campaign the likes of which has befallen no Jewish writer since



Spinoza. Do I exaggerate? All I know is that if a goy publicly insulted a Jew the way they have publicly insulted you, the B’nai B’rith would be screaming from every pulpit and every talk show, “Anti-Semitism”! (Operation Shylock 122)

Philip Roth, an avid observer of Jewish history and its dualities, has tried through his fiction to save the Jews from themselves and their anxieties by engaging with the questions and issues of Jewish self-definition in this post-Holocaust era.

Anxieties of Postwar Jewish Self

It is often the case with Roth that succeeding novels respond to, answer, or even rebut preceding ones if for no other reason than to decenter his audience, let them feel that nothing is stable, the identity, the selves - they all are malleable to influences and changes. Every performance is followed with a counter-performance, every novel with a counter-novel, because, for Roth, the reader must never find security and definite answer in the novel. Admittedly, Philip Roth is a disciple of the Chehkovian philosophy which is “the proper representation of the problem” (BBC Imagine 2014, Roth Unleashed). If The Counterlife and Operation Shylock offered arguments for Jews to live in the Diaspora and feel equal to their Israeli brethren, in American Pastoral (1998), Roth goes to a long stretch to undo that assumption and complacency. It should be noted that after Sabbath’s Theater (1996), Roth starts an introspection of the “American Tragedy”, the major events that shook America such as McCarthysm in 50s, the riots of the Vietnam War in the 60s, and the “purity binge” of the late 90s in the Lewinsky scandal.

Above all, Roth’s characters have always tried to reinvent themselves as Jews and as human beings. In American Pastoral, this reinvention comes to a halt when an American Jew relinquishes his roots and strives to be an ordinary, natural, regular American guy. In such a case, Roth implies, the loss of one’s identity is bound to happen because of the “isomorphism to the Wasp world” (American Pastoral, 1998: 89) – a fatal mistake that thwarts one’s attempts to enter the American dream.

American Pastoral tells the disastrous story of Seymour Irving “Swede” Levov, legendary high school athlete, all-American hero, a man full of warmth and friendliness and natural modesty, a man so beloved by



everyone in his community and so clearly destined for greatness that it would be hard to imagine anything ever threatening to “destabilize [his] trajectory” (American Pastoral 20). There simply were no obstacles for the Swede, remembers Nathan Zuckerman, who returns again as Roth’s narrator and authorial consciousness. The Swede is a man who would never “have to struggle to clear a space for himself” (American Pastoral 19). The closest thing to perfection Zuckerman has ever encountered, the Swede was in his very person the justification for the sweat and sacrifice of the immigrant generation, the walking embodiment of American possibility. He, in a way, was the embodiment of the fear that engulfed Henry in the section of Judea in The Counterlife. Leave it to Mr. Roth to explore and answer the deepest recesses of the minds of his characters.

In a country that gladly accepts, some would say promotes, “homogenization”, the Swede wore his Jewishness “lightly,” not merely because he was tall, athletic, and blond (hence “the Swede”), but especially because he projected an “unconscious oneness with America,” even if there was in that identification a “tinge of shame and self-rejection” (American Pastoral 20). The Swede was the ultimate “universal” assimilated American, a tribute to Irving Howe’s worst nightmare - the Jew turned into goy. The Jewish “problem” here is no more, because the Swede “sloughed off” that bit of Jewishness he had in order to be the all-American hero:

Conflicting Jewish desires awakened by the sight of him were simultaneously becalmed by him; the contradiction in Jews who want to fit in and want to stand out, who insist they are different and insist they are no different, resolved itself in the triumphant spectacle of the Swede who was actually only another of our neighborhood Seymours whose forbears had been Solomons and Sauls and who would themselves beget Stephens who would in turn beget Shawns. Where was the Jew in him? You couldn’t find it and yet you knew it was there. Where was the irrationality in him? Where was the crybaby in him? Where were the wayward temptations? No guile. No artifice. No mischief. All that he had liminated to achieve his perfection. No striving, no ambivalence, no doubleness—just the style, the natural physical refinement of a star. (American Pastoral 20)

Initially, the Swede’s problem is that he experienced at first no problem at all. The legacy of the “Solomons” seems to fade with each passing of a generation until it becomes almost undistinguishable in the “Shawns” – the renunciation of the Jewish identity for the “isomorphism to the Wasp



world” (American Pastoral 89). Unlike any of Roth’s previous characters such as Portnoy, Mickey Sabbath, Kepesh, Swede Levov is nonconflicting, and therefore, until his suffering begins, an empty shell of himself. He is not Roth’s celebrated kind of Jew like Smilesburger in Operation Shylock:

He is my kind of Jew, he is what “Jew” is to me, the best of it to me. Worldly negativity. Seductive verbosity. Intellectual venery. The hatred. The lying. The distrust. This worldliness. The truthfulness. The intelligence. The malice. The comedy. The endurance. The acting. The injury. The impairment” (394).

That being the case, The Swede is the negation of the diaspora Jew that Roth celebrated in Operation Shylock: no irony, no mockery, no wit - just not a Jew at all. Consequently, he can be said to be engulfed in the incredible drama of being a Jew who desires to own a piece of land as a WASP [White Ango-Saxon Protestant]. – a Jew uprooted from his identity and wishing to own a piece of the American dream, and as Jerry, his brother, sharply criticizes him, “to preserve [his] bucolic vision and upheld decorum” (American Pastoral 274). Lou Levov, father of the Swede, instinctively pinpoints the source of his son’s blight when he says: “You don’t have to revere your family,” Lou argues, “you don’t have to revere your country, you don’t have to revere where you live, but you have to know that you have them, you have to know you are part of them. Because if you don’t, you are just out there on your own” (American Pastoral 365). Swede Levov aspires to nothing so much as ownership of a piece of America’s rural paradise and like Gatsby, tries to live out a dream of spiritual and material possession—of calm, order, optimism, and prosperity, with his Catholic wife and the offspring of their deliberately deethnicized union named Meredith “Merry” Levov who shatters this dream by blowing up the post office and bringing mayhem to their house. “What is wrong with their life?” the narrator asks in the end. “What on earth is less reprehensible than the life of the Levovs?” (American Pastoral 423). Jerry Levov amply answers this question: “A ‘post-Catholic’ mother, a “post-Jewish” father, and together they went out to Old Rimrock to “raise little post-toasties” (American Pastoral 73).

The Swede, like Willy Loman in Miller’s Death of a Salesman (1949), says to his wife Dawnie “we can go anywhere, we can do anything. Dawnie, we’re free!’” (Salesman 308) No freer than Willy Loman ever was, the Swede in rejecting his Jewish past lays the groundwork of his demise and undoing,



and joins Loman and Gatsby in the “menagerie” of the fallen misguided American dreamers. Rejecting his Jewish past, he mistakenly believes he has seized the American future. The novel ultimately mourns what was lost when Jews sacrificed their identity in order to become assimilated: the American Dream becomes the American Berserk, the pastoral into the counterpastoral.

The Plot against the Jews

Any analysis on Roth’s fiction and its Jewish anxiety would be incomplete without addressing his most tributary work to Jews to date, The Plot Against America (2004). If The Counterlife and Operation Shylock were his most Jewish works of self-examination, then the Plot can be regarded as Roth’s celebration of the Jewish people, and most importantly, of the core that constitutes it - the family. The Plot enacts a traumatic vision of a counterfactual history of a violent anti-Semitic United States that Roth depicts with the keenest eye of a young innocent narrator, Philip.

Like in Operation Shylock, as an elaborate historical fantasy and fictional autobiography, Roth draws on the memory of the Holocaust in The Plot in order to examine his own sensibilities as a Jewish writer. He reimagines his childhood from the premise that Charles Lindbergh, not Franklin Delano Roosevelt, was elected President in 1940, a turn of event which would position the US not as an ally of England, France, and Russia but as part of the Axis powers of Japan, Italy, and Nazi Germany. Charles Lindbergh, the perfect model for the double image of the American hero and Roth’s linchpin for his intricate plot is a Nazi sympathizer and an anti-Semite. On September 11, 1941, at a meeting in Des Moines, Iowa, Lindbergh made his most notorious speech against the Jews when he decried the threat of Jewish groups: “Their greatest danger to this country lies in their large ownership and influence in our motion pictures, our press, our radio, and our Government” (The Plot, 2004: 387).

For Roth, racism, anti-Semitism, and other hatreds are the human stains of mankind in its pursuit towards happiness. Much like Toni Morrison with the “rememory” device, here Roth constructs a counterfactual past in order to explore not what could have happened if America had become a place for the pogroms but how his parents would have responded to such a situation. The novel’s power resides in Roth’s moving portrait of his



parents as a refuge from all fear, a “perpetual fear” which he names the last chapter of the book. The Plot satirizes the country’s reliance on institutions designed to insure democracy and equality but that deteriorate in the face of fear, passivity, and conformity. Fear and hysteria have always been trademarks of Roth’s fiction, and in The Plot one could argue that both fear and hysteria prevail upon a country which experiences a total loss of civil liberties and sees itself become an autocratic state whose basic institutions crumble under the nation’s fear of war with Hitler.

The Plot Against America can be read as tribute to Roth’s father and family who despite the traumatic devastation of an anti-Semitic America, never gave up on their homeland, and most importantly, acted as a sanctuary against external oppressive forces.

Conclusion - “Exclusively, totally, incessantly, irreducibly a Jew”

After five decades of incessant writing, can Mr. Roth still be considered a self-hating Jew who according to Irving Howe is indifferent to the social and historical realities? Certainly, even today Roth’s most zealous detractors would go on about the same thing and complain about the Jews in his novels of being vulgar, uncultured, and most of all, like their author, narcissists with a bad faith. His legacy continues to provoke torrid discussions even among the literati themselves, and we can only guess why Philip Roth once said to his friends and himself, “I’ll never write about Jews again,” (Facts, 1988: 129).

Nonetheless, Philip Roth’s contribution to American literature over the course of more than fifty years with thirty books lies in his scrutiny of the Jewish American identity from the vantage point of a late twentieth-century Jewish sensibility. A Jewish-American who owes his identity not only to his marvelous capacity for self-invention but to the history of Jews before him who made his story possible. Mr. Roth has always been troubled by his anxiety of how to forge an American identity from ethnic origins, how to be unencumbered by Jewish guilt and brush away the stereotypes that follow it. Contrary to Malamud’s rachmones [compassion] and Saul Bellow’s Menschlichkeit [humanism] which are central to the human and the Jewish enterprise, Philip Roth is wary of the uncertainty of what it means to be Jewish, not only of one’s connection to others, albeit fragile under the best of circumstances but also of one’s connection to oneself. The



Jews in his fiction struggle with their manufactured and remanufactured identities.

So, while Philip Roth’s fiction remains fiercely controversial with its masks and counterselves, his loyalty to the Jews can no longer be doubted. His books imaginatively address the dilemmas and paradoxes of late-twentieth-century Jewish existence, an existence plagued by crisis of identity in a post-Holocaust era and the birth of a Jewish state in the form of Israel. His novels engage and delve into the history, culture, and conflict of the Diaspora Jews in a post WW2 America. Moreover, Roth’s fiction exposes the sides of Jewish life, the dilemmas of the Jewish Diaspora, the depiction of Jews not as virtuoso but as raw human beings with their needs and innermost issues and traumas, living their dramas in the conundrums of the American experience, their history intertwined with that of America: “You flood into history and history floods into you. You flood into America and America flood into you” (I Married a Communist, 1998: 39). Not even Bellow himself had so perfectly pitched an ear for the speech of the first two generations of Jews who had come to America from Eastern Europe, the keen eye for the details of the life they lived, or as Podhoretz himself notes on Roth, “perception of the quirks and contours of their psychological makeup” (Podhoretz, Adventures 1998).

Once, when Isaac Bashevis Singer was interviewed by Roth, Singer recalled that often people inquired: “Why do you write about Jewish thieves and Jewish prostitutes?” Singer replied: “Shall I write about Spanish thieves and Spanish prostitutes? I write about the thieves and prostitutes that I know” (Shop Talk, 2001: 24). To the chagrin of his mortal intellectual nemesis, the now departed Irving Howe, Philip Roth’s fiction with its own mysteries and humor is the most representative of the contemporary Jewish-American life. As Aharon Appelfeld, another real person fictitiously deployed in Operation Shylock, says about him, “he is exclusively, totally, incessantly, irreducibly a Jew” (Shylock, 1993: 54).

References and Further Reading

Bloom, H 1996: Ed. Modern Critical Views of Philip Roth. Chelsea House, New York.



Cooper, A 1996: Philip Roth and the Jews, Albany, State University of New York Press. 41, 42.Gooblar, D 2011: The Major Phases of Philip Roth. New York: Continuum. 11.

Howe, I 1972: Philip Roth Reconsidered. New York: Commentary Magazine.

Howe, I 1976: World of Our Fathers. Galahad Books Press. 594, 595.

Parrish, T 2007: Ed. The Cambridge Companion to Philip Roth. Cambridge University Press. 49, 127, 130.

Podhoretz, N 1964: Doings and Undoings: The Fifties and After in American Writing. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. 240.

Podhoretz, N 1998: The Adventures of Philip Roth. New York: Commentary Magazine, 1998.

Pozorski, A 2011: Roth and Trauma: The Problem of History in the Later Works (1995–2010). New York, Continuum.

Roth, P 1959: Goodbye, Columbus and Five Short Stories. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.

Roth, P 1963: Writing About Jews. New York: Commentary Magazine.

Roth, P 1969: Portnoy’s Complaint. New York: Random House. 36, 76.

Roth, P 1975: Writing American Fiction, Reading Myself and Others. New York, Farrar, Straus & Giroux; rev. ed., New York, Penguin. 158, 195, 702.

Roth, P 1986: The Counterlife. New York, Penguin. 58, 61, 73, 77, 111, 154, 228, 320, 321, 324, 323.

Roth, P 1988: The Facts: A Novelist’s Autobiography. New York, Farrar, Straus & Giroux. 129.

Roth, P 1993: Operation Shylock: A Confession. New York, Simon & Schuster. 54, 122, 125, 126, 170, 171, 288, 329, 394.



Roth, P 1995: Sabbath’s Theater. New York, Houghton Mifflin.

Roth, P 1997: American Pastoral. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. 19, 20, 73, 89, 274, 365, 423.

Roth, P 1998: I Married a Communist. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. 39.

Roth, P 2001: Shop Talk: A Writer and His Colleagues and Their Work. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. 24.

Roth, P 2004: The Plot Against America. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. 387.

Safer, E 2006: Mocking the Age: The Later Novels of Philip Roth, Albany, State University of New York Press. 3.

Searles, G and Roth, P 1974: A Conversation with Philip Roth. University Press of Mississippi. 98.

Shostak, D 1997: The Diaspora Jew and the ‘Instinct for Impersonation’: Philip Roth’s Operation Shylock. Contemporary Literature 38, no. 4 : 742.

Shostak, D 2004: Philip Roth – Countertexts, Counterlives. Columbia, SC: U of South Carolina. 136.

The total number of words is 7187© LCPJ Publishing 2014 by Erion Shehu

Erion Shehu graduated for English language from the Faculty of Foreign Languages, University of Tirana, in 2011, and then continued his MA in Intercultural Communication. He is currently doing his PhD in the field of literary studies and participating in a doctoral academic exchange in Slovenia, being specialized in contemporary American literature. He has worked as a part-time lecturer at the department of English and has attended various summer schools in the UK and other countries.

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